PYRAMIDS NOT ALL EGYPTIAN.

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Mankind are toiling for a deathless name. ious are the schemes devised, and the plans pursued, to gain this one world-sought end-to rear a pyramid that shall not decay, but grow broader and higher with "the roll of ages. This is the nucleus of the world of thought. At its altar are immolated the smile and tear, the swell of delight and revenging throb, the sweets of duty, and joys of life, and hopes of heaven. No hardships, nor privations, nor sacrifices, but here are freely shrined. Eating the bread of sorrow and drinking the tears of mourning, the individual world. eagerly pursues the phantom of hope till death stops the chase and rolls them into the tomb. Dreaming of this, the peasant forgets his grief, and only seeks to become dear in his own circle, though icicles hang from his brow and freeze around his heart.

The student ekes out his life in midnight thought, tumbles into the grave, only craving a wandering sigh when years have rolled away. The conspirator cuts the bands of civil law, touches the spring of revolution, and heaves whole empires into a sea of tears, that his name may eddy away on the raging billows. The warrior builds his pyramid on the bloody battle plain; and where bayonet, and fire, and blood, blend their terrors, he deals death with his saber, and flings heart's blood at the sun with his glittering blade. The moral deceiver erects his in a more solemn realm. He blots out the sun of hope, rolls man up in self, and pushes a whole world to the doleful caverns of an eternal night. And what an illustration of this is Mohammed, that form of terror which blazed athwart the moral heavens, consumed the vital atmosphere, and shrieking with his latest breath, "Oh God!

pardon my sins," plunged into the awful whirlpool of shoreless remorse. How has the bleak, black summit of his pyramid been shattered by the scathing fires of heaven's judgment? To give his name to posterity, Cæsar crossed the Rubicon, and Rome was free no more. He built a terrible pyramid upon the ruins of the "Eternal City." But think you its vast height gave him pride, or availed him aught when the cold steel of Brutus' dagger rankled in his heart, and poured his blood on the Senate floor of Rome?

To gain an undying name, Alexander drew the sword of conquest, lit up the land with burning cities, quenched their sighs with tears, extorted the sigh of anguish from millions, and then died, seeking to show himself a god. And Bonaparte too, that lion, swimming in blood, went over Europe tying laurels on his brow with heart-strings, and writing his name with his blood-streaming sword, full on the thrones and foreheads of kings. The powers of his mind, throbbing in midnight dreams, shook the civilized world; and yet the delirious spirit of this world- wonderful warrior, whose haughty star withered kings and whose brow was unawed, whether his eagles hovered around the Alps or shrieked amid the flames of Moscow, died a powerless prisoner on the lonely billow-dashed isle of St. Helena. These have gained names more lasting than Egyptian pyramids. But oh! the doleful price of their eternal ruin. Who, who can read the history of such men as these and then seek a like immortality? May the winds of annihilation blow such desires from our earth! But is there no way of gaining a name, noble, glorious, immortal? Boundless are the fields, endless are the ways, and numberless the examples of pure and heavenly renown. Though the ways which lead to never-ending shame are many, there are paths that lead to

fame, unsullied and undying, up which many great minds have toiled unceasing, till death cut the fetters and sent them home.

The scholar, astronomer, poet, orator, patriot, and philosopher, all have fields, broad, fertile, perennial. The ruins of the "Eternal City" "still breathe, born with Cicero." The story of Demosthenes, with his mouth full of pebbles, haranguing the billows of old ocean, will be stammered by the school-boy "down to latest time." And after "the

foot of time" has trodden down his marble tombstone, and strewed his grave with the dust of ages, it will be said that nature's orator, Patrick Henry, while accused of treason and threatened with death, "hurled his crushing thunderbolts" at the haughty form of tyranny, and cried, "Give me liberty, or give me death," in accents that burned all over Europe.

Washington, too, has a pyramid in every American heart. When the serpent, tyranny, wrapped his freezing folds around our nation's heart, and with exulting hisses raised his horrid coils to heaven, then Washington hurled a thunderbolt that drove him back to molder and rot beneath the crumbling thrones of Europe, and sent the startling echo of freedom rumbling around our broad green earth. A fire of desolation may kindle in our metropolis and strew it in the dust, yea, may burn away our continent with all its monuments, but his name will be breathed with reverence till the ocean has ceased to heave, and time has ceased to be. Our countryman, Franklin, too; look at the pyramid that bears his name, burying its mighty summit in the lowering thunder-cloud, while around it the lightnings play and lurk, and write "Immortality." Has not Newton a name among the immortal? How eagerly did he grasp the golden chain, swung from the Eternal Throne, and with

what intense rapture and thrilling delight did he climb upward, vibrate through the concave of the skies, gaze around upon the stars, and bathe in the glorious sunlight of eternal truth that blazed from the center-Deity.

Can time, or winds, or floods, or fire, destroy Luther's pyramid? He reared it by an awful conflict, more terrible than ever hung on the tread of an army. The one carries thrones and empires, the silent thoughts of the other tell on the destiny of the world. Nerved by the Omnipotent, he stood up amid the smoke and flash of century-working batteries, and thundered, "Truth," till the world reeled and rocked as if within the grasp of an earthquake. Milton, too; the wave of oblivion. may surge over the pyramids, yea, may engulf all Africa, but Milton, who painted pyramids with heavenly glow, unlocked the brazen gates of the fiery gulf, heard its raging howl, and saw its maddening billows heave and plunge, will strike anew his golden lyre in heaven when yonder sun shall stay his fiery wheels mid-heaven, sicken, darken, and pitch lawless from his flaming chariot into the black chaos of universal ruin.

Nor is this all. A day is coming when the pyramids built in blood shall crumble and sink, when yonder firmament shall frown in blackness and terror, when the judgment fires shall kindle around the pillars that stay creation, and rolling their smoke and flames upward, fire the entire starry dome,—when burning worlds shall fly, and lighten through immensity, when the car of eternity rumbling onward, shall ever travel over the dismal loneliness and bleak desolation of a burned up universe; and then shall the pyramids of the just tower away in the sunlight of heaven, while their builders shall cull the flowers and pluck the fruits of the perennial city, and to God who created

them, and to Christ who redeemed them, swell an anthem of praise, increasing, louder and deeper, with the ceaseless annals of eternity.-P. O. Barnes.

PAUL REVERE'S RIDE.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend-" If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church tower, as a signal-light-
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said good-night, and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at the moorings lay
The Somerset, British man of-war;

A phantom ship, with each mast and spar,
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,

And a huge, black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack-door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And started the pigeons from their perch
On the somber rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—